A4.2: Chapter 5 – Richardson

Deidra Darst
9/12/07

Richardson, W. (2006).  RSS:  The new killer app for educators.  In J. Barbakow, E. Meidenbauer, J. Ward (Eds.), Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

TAP:  The topic of this chapter is Real Simple Syndication, or RSS.  It was written to persuade educators to include RSS into their daily Internet repertoires.

Claim:  Richardson claims that RSS feeds and aggregators are powerful tools that will be reshaping Internet users’ searching habits in the future (2006).  RSS, while seemingly complicated at first, actually simplifies its users’ lives by providing new information from various blogs and sites all in one place – the RSS aggregator.

Evidence:  Richardson provides a detailed explanation of the RSS feed and aggregator:  what it is, how it works and how it can improve interactions and information gathering for teachers and students.  Search-time is drastically decreased because new information is sent to you rather than you going to it.  Unlike email accounts that receive unsolicited messages, aggregators only receive information that you specify.  Richardson writes that this alone should be enough for you to convert to RSS subscriptions!  He explains the ease with which one can subscribe to an aggregator and begin receiving messages from their subscriptions.  RSS feeds are not limited to blogs.  Many sites are now incorporating RSS into their programming, which allows users to receive updates from news sources to Google sites.  Teachers can create on online community through the use of RSS; students and faculty can be connected through one another’s blogs and RSS feed subscriptions.  This is but one way in which information can be shared amongst a group of Internet users.

Connections:
text-to-self:  Richardson’s explanations about aggregators helped me understand the benefits of subscribing to blogs and sites via RSS feeds.  As he wrote in chapter 5, I imagined that aggregators could bombard me with new information.  He wrote that, with time and experience, users become more adept at finding the most pertinent information.  This sparked an interest in me, as this class is focused on literacy information skills.  He wrote about improving one’s information literacy skills through the use of RSS feeds, and I think he is correct in making this assumption.  While the aggregator is full of information concerning a particular topic, the user must be able to sift through everything and focus on the most pertinent information.  Even in our attempts to filter out information through the use of RSS feeds, we must be able to filter that information even further in order to access the most relevant information.

text-to-text:  This chapter from Richardson’s text is very similar to the document 7 Things You Should Know About RSS.  Both texts provide a basic overview of how RSS feeds work, but Richardson’s text provides step-by-step instructions about how to set up an account through various aggregator programs.  This reading and 7 Things both allude to RSS feeds’ ability to simplify Web searching for their users.  Richardson basically reiterates the statements presented in the 7 Things article and provides more in-depth information with explicit operating instructions.

text-to-world:  I can see how RSS feeds and aggregators could make an impact on my future career as a speech-language pathologist.  To explain my reasoning, I will elaborate on the example I provided in my last blog entry.  As a speech-language pathologist I will undoubtedly interact with parents of children with hearing impairments.  If parents are interested in cochlear implants, I could encourage them to subscribe, via an RSS feed, to cochlear implant-focused sites and blogs.  This would connect them to the recently published information about cochlear implants, and would aid them in their search for helpful information.  I, too, could benefit from RSS feeds by subscribing to sites that deal with areas of my professional concern and interest.